Sleep Better With ‘Night Light’ on Google Play Books App

Reading in bed is basically a national pastime. But staring at the bright screen of an e-book before sleep can be damaging to the eyes, while the blue light from smartphones and tablets may suppress our bodies’ production of melatonin, causing major sleep problems. So it’s good news that Google has added a light filter to its Play Books app, which gradually tapers the amount of blue light used by your display as you inch closer to bedtime. Night Light automatically adapts to your region’s level of natural sunlight based on the time of day. “The color adjustment is more comfortable on your eyes and greatly improves low-light night reading,” Greg Hartrell, senior product manager for Google Play Books, wrote in a blog post.

But no matter how convenient that might be, reading from a smartphone’s screen is not the best idea – nor the healthiest, especially come night time. Rolling out now to Android and iOS, Night Light can be activated on your phone or tablet via a pop-up notification the next time you open a digital book. But what is nice is how it ensures that the app displays text with increasingly red-green light, providing warmer pink-orange hues, as the evening wears on.

In order to reduce the eye damage, many reading apps, as well as book readers, have been offering users the possibility of switching to night mode reading. Amazon took a similar step earlier this month, updating Fire Tablets with Blue Shade, which “uses specialized filters to limit exposure to blue light.” The free feature—available on Fire HD 10, Fire HD 8, and Fire tablets (video below)—can be turned on or off with a single tap, and lets users drop the display brightness to an “ultra-low level.” For more, see How to Put Free Ebooks on Your Amazon Kindle. The new feature is available on Play Books for both iOS and Android as of today, and you just need to activate the Night Light option to make use of it. Manufacturers have already found a solution for that in the form of e-ink or e-paper display, which is known for being easy on the eyes even in direct sunlight.

Instead of you reading the usual black text on a white background, the app takes into account the hour and gives your background an increasingly amber taint. There are a number of other similar apps that were made available to the public, only most are either defunct or have been purchased by larger companies.